Marriage Is What Brings Us Together Today

A special Valentine's Day edition of Family Matters

It’s Valentine’s Day — not too late to buy flowers! — and that means it’s an extra-special (and extra-long) version of Family Matters:

• The Main Event: Marriage, that blessed arrangement, that dream within a dream

• It’s Me, Hi: The Dispatch, and The Dispatch again

• “Tax Reform in 2025: Putting Families First”: Video (and audio) available!

• Parting Shots

The Main Event

Love is in the air, but not as much as it should be. The realization that America’s fertility is downstream from its marriage crisis is starting to seep into the public consciousness. And while you can debate how much of marriage’s benefits are due to selection versus causation, the slew of new books pointing out the benefits to both adults and kids of a stable married household have helped coax the idea of promoting marriage out from its W.-era shadows.

We should be open to tweaking and improving some of the Healthy Marriage & Responsible Fatherhood grants that come out of HHS. Much of the work has focused on engaging unmarried dads and improving co-parenting skills, and evaluations show mixed success. Encouraging fathers of already-born kids to be present in their child’s life, and be a better partner with their child’s mother, is worthy work. But we face a broader problem, that of young adults not pairing off at all. I don’t think federal grants are going to be especially effective, though I’d be open to pitches — that, or taking a page from Russia’s proposal to provide couples with the equivalent of $55 (5,000 rubles) for a first date.

Photo via Flickr

Building a culture of marriage is going to be easier to sustain at the local than at the national one, which brings to mind a recent paper by Abigail Wozniak of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and Michael Baker and Susan Carter of the United States Military Academy. They look at all soldiers who enlisted in the U.S. Army from essentially 2002 to 2017 and track their outcomes across time (Mama, teach your children to be researchers at a service academy, because they get access to all sorts of fun administrative data.)

Each soldier is part of a company in which the share of their peers who arrive for duty who are married varies randomly — some groups have a disproportionately high share of married soldiers, some have more singles than on average. This gives the researchers the ability to isolate the impact of a single soldier being surrounded by peers who are already married, and what they find confirms that peer effects really matter.

In essence, this means that if the share of married soldiers in a company goes from, say, 48 percent (the statistical average) to 54.5, the likelihood that a single soldier ends up married two years after reporting for duty increases by roughly two percent (a statistically significant jump at the p <0.05 level).

This is relevant for a number of reasons — first, the universe of enlisted soldiers is almost all young adults with no more than a high school degree, the exact subgroup that has been hit hardest by the decline in marriage. Secondly, while marriage has declined the sharpest among racial minorities, male Black and Hispanic male see an even higher increase in the likelihood of marriage after being randomly assigned to a company that happened to have more married soldiers in it. Lastly, the effect seems to be limited only to marriage – being assigned to a unit with more parents in it doesn’t lead to a greater likelihood to have kids.

Perhaps most interestingly, they suggest that the increased likelihood of marriage isn’t because soldiers become more aware of the housing benefits that married couples have access to. They say it’s driven “primarily by soldiers imitating or modeling behavior they see among their peers or responding to existing social norms.” In other words, it’s not the Army’s practice of better social benefits for couples that produces a pro-marriage culture; it’s at least partially due to being in a micro-culture that treats marriage as the norm, rather than the exception.

Economists have increasingly identified how social networks and norms can influence school outcomes, job prospects, fertility, and divorce– this is yet another example of how peers matters, and how subcultures can set implicit normative expectations.

This trickles down to the norms and behaviors that young people are socialized into. Going beyond the paper, we might easily imagine military training helping young men, in particular, become more self-disciplined, more focused, more responsible; in short, more likely to be the type of person worth marrying compared to the counterfactual high school graduate who didn’t join the military. For young men from underprivileged backgrounds, simply seeing what it takes to be an attractive potential partner and a good spouse might be the source of some of this spillover.

The long debate over whether working-class male wages have fallen or simply stagnated rests outside the scope of this post, but in some ways it’s immaterial; I don’t think we can fully understand the decline in marriage as a strictly economic matter (when fracking led to increased (non-college) male wages in specific regions, those areas saw higher births, but inside and outside of wedlock, but marriage rates did not change.)

In an era where marriage was the social norm — single women faced economic discrimination, married ones received a financial and status premium — the bar men had to clear to be marriage material was commensurately lower. Economic theory talks about a “reservation wage” below which non-work is preferable to work; for most of human history, the “reservation spouse” was pretty low. Now, expectations for men have shifted. It’s less about the sole breadwinner and more about being the emotional support, life partner, logistics coordinator, attentive spouse, etc. (See Scott Winship’s recent thread about how this may correlate with education.) From the male perspective, the bar one has to clear to be considered “marriageable” has been raised; not predominantly due to wage trends, but because women expect more from a spouse than they did a half-century ago.

Building up men capable of meeting that reality is a project that goes beyond federal grants. It involves education, civil society, faith groups, and other formative institutions aiming not just at increasing a young person’s professional success, but forming them as future partners and spouses, too. It means aiming at creating subcultures — and economies — where young people can be reasonably expected to marry, rather than linger in cohabitation for years (pastors, bishops — I’m talking about you). It involves public policies that — at the bare minimum — do not discourage marriage, and experiment with prudent ways to reward it. It means biting the bullet to freely admit that marriage should be celebrated over singleness or less-stable types of relationships, though without veering into backlash-inspiring caricatures.

Expecting a restoration of marriage without getting to some of these root causes would be, well, inconceivable.

It’s Me, Hi

For The Dispatch, I reviewed

Ross Douthat

’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious:

“I, like many believers, am predisposed to find his arguments imminently plausible. If the book brings even one skeptic to seriously contemplate mortality, the project will have been worth it. Still, the conviction of the last chapter provides an intriguing hint of an even more persuasive book if Douthat had put his doctrinal cards on the table from the outset, rather than pocketing them in the interest of even-handedness. Perhaps a future director’s cut is in order.”

ALSO for The Dispatch, I spoke to Michael Reneau about DOGE and the creeping tendency on the right to view faith-based partnerships with suspicion, rather than as an opportunity to advance a Tocquevillian view of social service provision. This one is subscribers only, I’m told, sorry.

I spoke to Politico’s Joanne Kenen about the impulse driving some Republicans in Congress to turn to Medicaid cuts to pay for their desired tax cuts:

“You can say President Trump was elected on a mandate. But the mandate was not ‘Let’s slash health care from working-class Americans.’”

Leah Libresco Sargeant

and I engaged in the second part of our virtual book club on Hawon Jung’s Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women' s Rights Worldwide. An excerpt:

Leah: I think it really points to the danger of the internet as a place to connect people with predatory impulses and then bind them into an increasingly coarsening and violent community.

Patrick: In a sense, the Internet acts like a technological shift that increases the returns to scale for something like upskirt photos. Instead of a guy privately ogling someone on the subway, he can now take a photo, upload it, and participate in a perverse sense of community. It goes from gross on an individual scale to mass-produced, self-replicating objectification.

"Flowers of Fire" Book Club, Week Two: “Where Did All the Girls Go?”

“Tax Reform in 2025: Putting Families First”

We were very fortunate to have been able to sneak in a full house and a great panel just before snow enveloped D.C. this week. If you weren’t able to attend, you’re still in luck! Video is now available:

Thanks to some A/V wonkiness, the audio of the video stream is sub-professional grade when we get to the panel discussion. If you’d like a higher-quality audio feed and don’t mind not being able to see our smiling faces, that’s available here.

Big thanks to Tim Carney, Bethany Mandel, and Ramesh Ponnuru for joining. Even bigger thanks to Rep. Blake Moore, whose staff helped make the event possible, and led off with some great opening remarks, which are partially excerpted below:

“We were talking about all of the priorities that President Trump had put out when he was on the campaign trail, from no tax on tips to no tax on overtime, to no tax on car loans […and] no tax on Social Security...And I stopped the meeting in its tracks and I said, 'I've just got to get something off my chest.' And I just blurt it out...‘Are we gonna care about families anymore? Are we going to care about kids anymore in this country? Do you know what we're spending on seniors versus what we're spending on our youth? I represent the youngest state in the nation and we’re sick and tired of just pandering to older voters.’…And it was kind of out of character for me to have an outburst like that. But the point is real...

“There’s plenty of research that says people would actually prefer to have more children than they're able to, or they’re strapped on being able to do. It's expensive. People hit really hard with regards to cost of living, and it’s happened across every single community in our country. People would want to have more children. We have a birth rate that is not replacing itself — Utah is doing its part! So everybody likes to joke that, you know, this is Blake's deal, but it’s also [VP] J.D. Vance’s deal. It's also [Sen.] Josh Hawley’s deal. And you've seen from the Trump administration that they want to promote good, strong family policy, this absolutely makes sense.”

Parting Shots

• Two especially noteworthy upcoming events:

  • The Convergence Center for Policy Resolution is hosting an event on family flourishing at the Georgetown McCourt School Auditorium, featuring leading pro-family voices across the political spectrum (Thu., Feb. 19, at 5p)

  • AEI and the New Atlantis will be hosting a symposium based on the recent statement on tech and family, featuring a whole slew of friends of Family Matters, including

    Clare Morell
    ,
    Brad Littlejohn
    ,
    Santi Ruiz
    , Robert Bellafiore, and more. (Mon., Feb. 24 at 11a)

• In his State of the State address, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee proposed creating a $60 million starter home revolving loan, $75 million to establish downtown public safety grants, $6 million to reduce benefit cliffs in state child care subsidies, framework for commercial nuclear power, common application for Tennessee colleges, school choice, youth employment - you know what, just go read the whole summary, it’s so good

• In other news of Republican governors doing public policy well, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is proposing increasing the state's tobacco tax to pay for a $1,000 per-child tax credit for families making less than $94,000. If it passes, the Buckeye State would become the first GOP-led state in the country to adopt a refundable child credit (Idaho and Oklahoma currently have non-refundable ones)

• Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) has introduced the Family Income Supplemental Credit Act, which would replace the CTC with a per-child benefit to mothers and parents from the fifth month of pregnancy until the child’s 18th birthday. Per-child monthly payments would be largest during pregnancy and taper as the child grows older — $800 for expecting mothers from the fifth month of pregnancy, $400 from birth to age 6, and $250 from age 6 to 18. A laudable contribution to the debate over how best to support families.

• Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell reports Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) that will be introducing reforms to the Child Care Development Block Grant program that would allow vouchers to be used for relative-provided care and exempt in-home care providers from some of the usual licensing standards (Daily Signal)

• Marissa Martinez examines the Section 45S Paid Family and Medical Leave tax credit, and whether the bipartisan effort to encourage businesses to provide paid leave could see any changes (either expansion or reduction) in this Congress (The 19th)

• Richard Reeves examines an interesting case out of Arizona, about an unmarried man filing for rights related to a child he fathered. In addition to the long-overdue updating of family law he writes about, conservatives should be especially attuned to the importance of biological paternity in law.

Unmarried Dads matter too

• Lastly, and leastly but most excitingly, Spring Training is back, and so are real jerseys — Nike has relented, shelving its new-age ‘innovative’ uniforms for the old models, complete with pants that don’t split open, legible names, fabric that doesn’t look like pajamas, and team-specific fonts and lettering. Who says traditionalists are never able to win back terrain from the march of Progress?

  

  One is an actual baseball jersey, the other looks like a free t-shirt giveaway…Rack one up for Team RETVRN (photo via X.com/TheBobbyMullins)

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